Crank’s News: Greece told to seek royalty for Olympics

Athens: Faced with a mounting debt crisis, Greece has been advised by the global management consulting firm McKinsey to monetise the biggest sporting brand that it (Greece) has given to the world: Olympics.

‘Make no mistake about it, Olympics is a humungous brand. And it, without any doubt, belongs to Greece. We think it is only fair that it gets to monetise that,’ said Roberto Rastapopoulos of McKinsey, which was appointed by the new caretaker government to suggest ways and means to shore up the floundering Grecian economy.

‘I am surprised that Greece has not done it so far. But I am also happy that Greece has not done it so far. If it had, we couldn’t have recommended it now and charged a bomb for it,’ Rastapopoulos chuckled.

According to the plan mapped out by the management whiz kids of McKinsey, Greece should, forthwith, initiate steps to help Olympics embrace the private franchisee model, which has delivered billions and billions in the case of sporting leagues like the NBA and the IPL.

The McKinsey design envisages converting each participating nation in the Olympics into the equivalent of a franchise/club. ‘They have to pay money to be part of the Olympics, which is the brainchild of Greece,’ Rastapopoulos pointed out.

So when a country pays the guarantee money, does it get the right to send its athletes and players to the Olympics? ‘No’, Rastapopoulos interjected, ‘when a country pays the royalty it becomes eligible to send any number of officials to the Olympics.

In my experience, he said, Olympics is a grand sporting event attended primarily by sports officials.

‘Once this part is streamlined, we hope to further enhance revenue generation by opening up for sponsorship the title (Olympics) and the various medals on offer,’ Rastapopoulos added. ‘I hear that in the IPL they have even branded the catches taken and the fours and sixers hit in the matches. In which case, branding gold, silver and bronze medals in the Olympics shouldn’t be all that difficult.’

Rastapopoulos conceded that the Olympic telecasts needed to improve if it were to become commercially more interesting. ‘At the core, Olympics is a spectacle. Of human ability and endurance. So, when we telecast the various events our main aim must be to showcase those who help make the Olympics the spectacle that it is’. The athletes? ‘No, I am talking of the corporates here’, Rastapopoulos explained.

Rastapopoulos, however, warned that the royalty amount and other money, even though in billions of Euros, will not be sufficient to fully bail Greece out of the financial crisis it finds itself in now. ‘A large percentage of those billions, I am afraid, will be good enough only to pay McKinsey’s consultancy charges,’ Rastapopoulos said.

‘In corporate circles, when struggling companies, looking for a turnaround, seek our advice, our first suggestion to them is: reduce your expenditure. And those companies, bless them, pay us top money, but sack some of their regular employees. This is the beauty of management consultancy,’ he said.

In the case of Greece, Rastapopoulos said, our suggestion to them would be to leverage more out of their many undoubted assets. Like charging royalty for Pythagoras Theorem. ‘Imagine the royalty that will accrue to Greece whenever some student somewhere uses it. I think we are sitting on a goldmine here,’ Rastapopoulos.

Depending on the success of this, McKinsey will think about levying royalty on shipping companies using the Archimedes principle to keep their fleet afloat.

Elsewhere, reacting to the possible charging of royalty for the use of Pythagoras Theorem by students, the Indian government has done the most logical thing in the circumstance: Ban Pythagoras Theorem from all school textbooks.

In a related development, a PIL has been filed in the Supreme Court by a group of former students seeking retrospective marks for the sums in the mathematics paper they did not attempt on the grounds that they involved usage of Pythagoras Theorem.

(Disclaimer: We think the rest of the world is entitled for damages from Greece for Archimedes Principle and Pythagoras Theorem. We know we have the support of all school students on this)